Introduction

UAE is a famous Amiga emulator ported to the Wii. UAE Wii can be found on Github at github.com/Oibaf66/uae-wii, and is based on the source code of E-UAE. It allows you to play Stunt car racer, Turrican, Midwinter and the other good old Amiga games on your Wii. The port uses SDL Wii.
The initial port was made by Simon Kagstrom. From release 5.1 the project is carried out by Fabio Olimpieri (Oibaf).

Budbrain megademo on the wii

Stunt car racer on the wii

Installation

Untar the binary release on your SD card, which gives you a structure as follows:

Amiga kickstart images go into /uae/roms/, with the default name from uaerc being kick.rom. Thereafter put your floppy images in /uae/floppies/ and you are set to go. The first filename character should not be "[" . You can also load the images from usb HD or from computer with a wi-fi connection through SMB protocol. In the last case, you should configure uaerc.smb file and select the option in the option menu. See the tinysmb page for additional information and troubleshooting.

3. Copy /Amiga Files/Shared/rom/amiga-os-xx.rom to /uae/roms/kickxx.rom on your SD card following this mapping:

uae/roms/amiga-os-120.rom to /uae/roms/kick12.rom

uae/roms/amiga-os-130.rom to /uae/roms/kick13.rom

uae/roms/amiga-os-205.rom to /uae/roms/kick205.rom

uae/roms/amiga-os-310.rom to /uae/roms/kick31.rom

Note that amiga-os-130.rom must be copied twice.

4. If you have upgraded from an older version than 3, remove /uae/uaerc.saved from your SD card

You can also dump the kickstart-rom of one of your own real Amigas, this requires a rom-dumper program (can be found here) and you will need to be able to transfer files to and from your Amiga. The easiest way to achieve this is to also use an Amiga that can write PC-DOS disks (Amiga Workbench 2.0 or higher) or by using a terminal program on both ends and a null-modem cable. Lemon Amiga has more help on the subject here, they also explain how to transfer games.

Configuration

UAE is very configurable, so take some time to lookup how the configuration file format works. At start up UAE loads uaerc (default configurations) and, if it is present, uaerc.saved which will override uaerc. A lot of configuration options are configurable from the menu system and you can save the current configuration as uaerc.saved or as one of 5 configuration files (uaerc.user[1-5]).

The menu support allows selecting which amiga model to emulate. When switching model, UAE wii will try to load a matching kickstart image and thereafter reset the computer. If the kickstart is not found, it will keep the current, but remember that this might not give you a functioning Amiga. The model/kickstart mapping is as follows:

A1000: uae/roms/amiga-os-120.rom /uae/roms/kick12.rom

A500: uae/roms/amiga-os-130.rom /uae/roms/kick13.rom

A600: uae/roms/amiga-os-205.rom /uae/roms/kick205.rom

A1200: uae/roms/amiga-os-310.rom /uae/roms/kick31.rom

If you experience some problems in the emulation try to change the configurations. If you hear some glicthes in the sound or some slowing down try to set "CPU emulation accuracy" to fast, "CPU to chipset speed" to max, resolution to 320X240 and possibly reduce the framerate. Another very small improvement can be added setting "Collision level" to none (most of the games do not require the collision detection) and "leds" to off.

Most of the games can run at 100% framerate if the 320X240 resolution is set. Only very few AGA based games can not reach 50 fps.

If you have some problems in loading the files or in the emulation try to set "floppy speed" to normal, "CPU emulation accuracy" to compatible and "CPU to chipset speed" to real.

Usage

Wiimote 1 acts as both mouse in port 1 and joystick in port 2. To use Wiimote as mouse you have to point it towards the screen, also for the buttons. Some games require the disabling of the mouse emulation to work; others require the disabling of the second and third joystick button. You can also use a real mouse plugged into the usb port. There is a graphic virtual keybord called by "+" button which uses the IR Wiimote pointer.

Version 5.1

Version 5

(Binary) Rebuild against the latest devkitPPC, libogc and SDL (fixes some SD corruption issues caused by the old libfat)

Version 4

Support for the Mario Kart wheel in games where it makes sense to use it (stunt car racer!)

(Binary) Rebuild against the latest devkitPPC, libogc and SDL

Version 3

Correct banner showing errors. With this fix, a dialogue box is now opened if kick.rom is missing

Support Cloanto's amiga forever ROMs in the default config

Version 2

Allow configuring most important options from the menu (Amiga models etc)

Fix Nunchuk/Classic controller conflict

Add virtual keyboard to set keyboard-to-controller-button bindings

Store configuration when modified in the menu and allow uaerc.user to override the configuration

Saving and restoring states now work

Harddisk support is now built in, but works so-so (and has no menu support)

Hundreds of small fixes here and there

Version 1

Initial release

This version has only received light testing and there will be bugs

Graphics look bad in Workbench, but hey - who cares about that?

There is a menu, but few menu options actually work. Patches are welcome!

Other topics

License

UAE is GPLv2. I've always liked the "PostcardWare" concept though, so if someone likes the emulator, send a postcard to

Simon Kågström

Birkagatan 21A

113 36 Stockholm

Sweden

Other UAE Wii implementations

"Gouky" has ported UAE4All to the Wii as well, and has now also released the source code for it. You can get the source code here. Unfortunately, the differences between E-UAE and UAE4All are large, so it will be difficult to integrate changes from there.

Thanks to

The upstream developers who did more than 99.995% of the work!

Christopher Follett from the PSPUAE project who has implemented a large chunk of the Amiga setup code and made various other improvements

Tantric for the various improvements of SDL without which this would have been impossible